WhatsApp maintains its stand on govt's request for message traceability in India

WhatsApp maintains its stand on govt's request for message traceability in India

WhatsApp, however, has maintained that it has already said what it needed to say on the matter of traceability of messages in India.

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Shweta Ganjoo

New Delhi

June 18, 2019

UPDATED: June 19, 2019 15:45 IST

HIGHLIGHTS

Indian government has asked WhatsApp to digitally fingerprint all its messages.

Digitally fingerprinting messages would enable traceability of messages on WhatsApp.

Indian government wants WhatsApp to trace origin of a message without seeing its contents.

The Indian government numerous times in the past has requested WhatsApp to device a technological solution that would allow the government to trace the origins of a message. The Facebook-owned social messaging app, however, has maintained that doing so would fundamentally compromise end-to-end encryption that protects the contents of all the messages shared on its platform. And now, reacting to a fresh report regarding Indian government's demands of message tracebility, WhatsApp has said that it has nothing new to add to what it has already said regarding the matter.

"We have nothing new to add to what we have previously said on this," a WhatsApp spokesperson said reacting to a report by the Economic Times which states that the Indian government has once again raised the matter with the social messaging app.

The ET report states that the Indian government has asked WhatsApp to add a digital fingerprint to every message sent on its platform without compromising on its E2E encryption, two government officials told the publication. This would allow the Indian government to trace the origins to the message that contain fake or errorneous news, which in turn has lead to tens of cases of mob lynchings in the past among others.

The government essentially wants the company to device a technological solution that would allow the company to trace the origin of a message, determine how many people have read it and forwaded it all without breaking its encryption such that a problematic message can be traced back to its source.

"Fingerprinting WhatsApp messages will help find the originator of the message. That is all we want," the government official told ET.

The officials added that the government would keep the traceability requests for a limited number of cases to ensure that there aren't thousands of people sending special requests to the Facebook owned social messaging app.

WhatsApp, at the moment, does not keep a track of the messages shared on its platform. But if it were to acknowledge Indian government's request, it would have to redesign its entire platform in order to keep a check on all the messages shared on its platform.